No Bait, More Fishes!

So I want to share another secret here from learning at the Pacifica Pier today, and boy! Pacifica Pier is truly an interesting place to fish because its ever-chaning fish crowds! My first post about fishing shows all big surfperches like Silver and Walleye and 2 little smelts, and they were totally after artificial sandworm. But there was one time we went and there was no big surfperches so we didn't catch any fish with sandworm but everybody else was catching baby surfperches, and we found out baby surfperches only chase after shrimp, and then we bought some shrimp from a guy at the pier and as soon as we dropped down the rig, they nibbled like crazy! 


And today all fishes we caught are big Jacksmelt and baby Silver Surfperches and Shiner Surfperches, and we've never seen big Jacksmelt there before. At the very beginning we were still using all the left over shrimp bait and we did catch Jacksmelt but very slowly, and there's this guy who came later and all the sudden he became the focus because he caught big Jacksmelt one after another or I should say three after another three...I'm not exaggerating, it's really like every other minute he'd catch something, and we didn't even see him put on any bait, and there we found that he used very shining fly rig! I was thinking if I'm a fish I'd like to check out the interesting shining bug in the water, too! So he had like probably 8 fly rigs on the line, and he caught the most fishes without using ANY bait! And because he didn't need to spend time cutting and putting bait on, he quickly unhooked the fishes and just throw them in cooler and his rig's already down in the water again in minute. How efficient! 


Top left was first Jacksmelt I caught, and top right was second one I caught.... I was counting at the beginning but I lost count after many because we got busy with all the tasks and taming the strong Jacksmelt to unhook took a while. Bottom left is all Jacksmelt and Surfperches we caught, and bottom right is Jacksmelt on grill as soon as we returned home! Chong and Raul also caught 2 Bullhead fishes (Pacific Staghorn Sculpin), but people at the pier told us not to eat those, so we put them back in the ocean, however, Raul found some people favor Bullhead fish on the internet! So maybe next time we catch it again, we'll try it!